The food ration is intermittent. At some overnight stops, there’s bread or even soup or potatoes, but sometimes there’s nothing. When there’s a pause to rest, the guards let them into the fields to forage for turnips, mangolds, and potatoes, which they dig out of the frozen ground with their bare hands and eat raw, with the earth still on.
They are still covering punishing distances of more than twenty kilometers each day. They pass Bad Muskau and the River Spree, with factories farting their smoke into the sky. There’s a huge chemical works, and then a field of hop poles. Bill remembers going down to Kent once on a working holiday with Flora’s family to harvest hops, everyone laughing in the summer air. He is hardly able to believe a day will come when these will be hanging with green vines and people will laugh in these fields.
They walk on, still pulling their sledge, until the track again enters the dark and gloom of a thick pine forest. Bill wonders if they have wolves in Germany, but thinks he’d better not ask for fear of worrying Izzy. He thinks the prisoners are all such sick weaklings now that wolves could pick them off like baby deer.
For three whole days, they eat nothing at all. They’ve still got a cake of soap, but the villages they pass through have either been bombed or are shut up tightly against them. Bill begins to grab at something in the air before him as he shuffles onward. Izzy catches his hand, and he looks at her puzzled, not knowing who she is for a second. Then he focuses. “Sorry,” he says. “It was right there in front of me. A big slab of bread and drippin’. Right there where I could grab it.”
At the next village, they drop back in line till the postern is ahead of them, and they look out for someone ready to barter. A woman in a head scarf and shawl is standing close to the column, watching them pass. Bill catches her eye and shows her their last cake of soap. She nods and reaches into her apron pocket, quickly snatching the soap and pressing a bread roll into Bill’s hand. Bill pulls the roll into three portions and shares it with Izzy and Max. It isn’t fresh, but they press it quickly into their dry mouths, chewing and chewing.
They overtake more civilian refugees. A young woman with two children hanging on her skirts stands next to a cart piled high with her possessions. The cart has one wheel missing. Her clothes were once well cut, good quality, now dusty and ragged. She holds out one hand for food, but doesn’t look at them. As they come level with her, Max unstraps his watch and presses it into her hand. Bill just catches the astonished look on her face as they shuffle past, and shares her disbelief.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” says Bill. “That was your last birthday present from your folks.”
“I know.”
Bill is urgent. “You could’ve swapped it for food for yourself. That’s what your mum ’n’ dad’d want.”
“It might be enough to keep all three of them alive. They’re the next generation,” says Max reasonably. “And I’ve got a feeling I’m not going to need it.”
They walk on in silence, and Bill says quietly, “You’re a good man,” though he can’t help thinking Max could have used his watch to feed his friends, not a family of strangers.
In every barn Izzy scratches the floor, searching for a trapdoor covered in earth leading to a basement where potatoes, beetroots, carrots and corn might be stored. Bill watches her indulgently; though he doesn’t believe she’ll find it, it’s important to have hope. But one evening she comes to them, eyes shining with triumph, and pulls Bill and Max over to see. As soon as Bill opens the trapdoor, he can smell the dry, clean smell of stored vegetables.
Max hisses, “Shut it quick. Goon up!”
They wait for the postern to close the big barn doors for the night, and then Bill takes charge, calling out, “Quietly, everyone. Cousins has found some food here.”
Men nearby move aside as Bill hauls up the trapdoor. Max and Izzy hold it open while Bill drops down, lights a match and calls back up, “Yes. Spuds. Turnips. Something else.”
They help him back up, and all the eyes are watching him, somewhere between hope and desperation.
Bill says, “Quiet, now. Don’t let the goons know. Form an orderly queue. I’ll get down there and hand it up. Let’s say one spud each for now. Then we’ll get it all up and share it out properly. There’s enough for everyone, but if you push in, you don’t get anything.”
He drops back down and begins to hand the vegetables up to Izzy and Max to distribute. The other prisoners line up for Izzy and Max to give them their share, each taking their potato and either eating it raw or cutting it up into tiny chunks to cook on their blowers. When each of them has one potato, Bill continues to hand up the rest of the winter store, Max counts the men in the barn and they divide it so everyone has something to take away with them to eat tomorrow.
They pass through bomb-wrecked towns and villages, with houses burning. Sometimes the side of the house has fallen away, leaving a room like a theater set, with a fireplace, wallpaper and curtains flapping at a window, as if the actors will step back into it at any moment and the action of their lives will continue exactly as before. All along the road, Bill sees makeshift graves hacked from ice. Many are child-sized.
Out in the countryside again, up in a snowy field close to the shadow of the trees, a dark shape catches Bill’s eye. Something standing with its ears pricked up, ready to run or fight. He points it out to Izzy and Max.
“I think it’s a hare,” Max says.
“I ain’t never seen one,” says Bill, and Izzy looks astonished.
The hare seems important to Bill in some way he can’t fathom, like a message to him in a language he doesn’t know. If only he could understand it, then this whole sorry mess would make some sense.
Max is doing some calculations. “I think it’s the first of March,” he says. “A mad March hare! Fancy that.”
• • •
One afternoon the grayness of the interminable days suddenly lifts, and the sun breaks through. They can feel some warmth on their backs and begin to find it more difficult to pull the sledge. It slowly dawns on Bill that the temperature has risen a few degrees, enough so the snow on the road is melting under his tramping feet. First the snow gets thinner, then patchy, until it’s completely gone and their sledge is bumping over the pitted road or cobbles or grass. Within an hour he and Max have decided this is impossible. They have to take turns pulling every five minutes or so, and it’s too hard to let Izzy do it. All along the roadside other makeshift sleds have been left behind.
“If we could keep going till tonight, we could at least burn the wood for some warmth,” puffs Bill. They keep on, switching and switching about for another mile or two, until there’s a short rest period; then he agrees with Max that they have no choice but to abandon the sledge. He’s proud of its construction and sorry to leave it behind. They unload their kit bags and blankets.
“We must keep the blowers,” says Bill.
“There’s no room in my bag,” says Max, and Bill thinks, That’s odd.
Izzy takes one blower, and Bill takes the other. Bill wraps his two blankets crosswise around him and ties them with string. Izzy wears hers like two cloaks over her kit bag. Izzy and Bill don’t have any food to weigh them down, and apart from a couple of turnips covered in earth, their kit bags only contain their mess tins and cups; blowers; pajamas; small, dirty towels; Izzy’s stained rags; Bill’s photographs; and Izzy’s last square of chocolate. He keeps his remaining harmonica in his battle dress pocket. He thought they were wearing all their clothes, and yet Max’s bag looks heavy when he swings it up onto his back. Bill has a rush of suspicion that Max has got some tins of food he’s keeping for himself. He’ll have to keep an eye on him, he thinks.